When we think dreams die and desires disappear - part 2

As I wrote yesterday, I've been wrestling with some thoughts that were brought to light at a small group. I'm taking a look at these in several posts because it's too much for one post alone. As I wrote yesterday...

At that small group, immediately I began thinking of desires I had once had and had shelved because they seemed to crazy, or too unattainable, but none-the-less things I deeply longed for, or still long for. And in these last couple of week I've realized that there are many things I've forgotten about, and/or intentionally abandoned that God's not finished with yet. It's time to get vulnerable again in the coming posts. I'm going to explore school, location, love and maybe more. Keep watching and reading and praying.

Today, school is the idea I'm exploring and sharing  about. I have always enjoyed school. I've liked learning new things and challenging myself in new ways. I've liked my teachers, and for the most part my fellow students. There are many different types of schools I've been a part of with such different types of learning.

I grew up in a really small town in New Hampshire, where there was only one school for all the kids in kindergarten through grade 8, all 250 of us. It was s GIGANTIC wasn't it! We joked that the school and town was so small that we were never going to escape it. Yet, it was in this school, because of the close knit feeling, that I felt a push to accelerate and really make something of life. Here, I was empowered to dream and to explore. Here, I fell in love with art and design. Here, I knew I wanted to be a designer.

I'm unique that I think my teachers influenced me far more than my friends. I wasn't afraid of my teachers per say, but I respected them and I wanted to do right by them. They wanted the best out of me, and I wanted to do that. Often, it looked like I was a teacher's pet. However, a desire was beginning in me that maybe one day, I would be a teacher.

I went to two high schools and the second one I was not a fan of. There were some great things that happened in these schools that I'm grateful for, but mainly I looked toward what was in the future.  I had begun to set my sights on Point Loma Nazarene University. My youth pastor had told us he'd gone there but he never really expanded much on it to anyone. However, one day he came up to me and said something like he thought I really needed to know about this school and I really should look into attending it. He thought that it was a place God was leading me. What he didn't know was that I already had been looking at it, and my heart was set to go there.

As he and his wife shared with me about the school and began praying with me about it. This was my first glimpse really, that God had a hand on the future and my pathway of life. Why would God tell someone else this and not me? And it seemed crazy! It was insane to go to a school 3,000 miles from home, when I came from small town USA. Yet, God knew the desires of my heart to see new places, to learn new things, and experience life-changing events.

Caf Lane @ PLNU

In the fall of 2001, I packed up and moved away from family and friends to sunny San Diego. I began my studies in Graphic Design and loved it. Again, I was being impacted by my teachers so much. They weren't just educators, but they were friends. They pushed and pushed both my work and my life. My desire to be a teacher grew more and was being refined. I wanted to be a college professor teaching design.

Going into my senior year I thought I was going to have to drop out of the university. The funding just wasn't there and things weren't working like they were supposed to. Yet I committed it to the Lord. He'd brought me here. He was going to keep his hand on everything. Amazingly, just days before school was scheduled to begin, I was told I could stay.

By the time I graduated, I had talked to enough people and explored my options and I had a plan for the future. I wanted to be a design professor later in life and I knew I would need a Master's degree to do so, but I didn't want to go straight into a masters program and I was advised not too. The given advice was: Go work first, get knowledge of the field, have an idea of what you want to learn, and then you go back to school. So my plan was work 3 years, apply to school and go back for the masters.

Life didn't work so easily. It never does. First, it took a couple of years to even find a job. So of course I didn't look for masters programs at all at first because I wanted the work experience. When I did begin looking, I realized art school for a masters program was so expensive and not possible. States schools often didn't have the programs I truly wanted. Then I moved and no longer had residency discounts so the programs available really weren't worth the money. It took about a year to accept it, but my dream for becoming a college professor and going to Grad school was something I abandoned. I intentionally told myself it wasn't going to happen. And I found peace in that.

Haha. God wasn't done with it though.

I spent my two weeks in Northern Ireland last summer, and I came back talking about it frequently. A friend of mine had know how much grad school had been on my heart, and what my struggle with it had been. She was also seeing how I was effected by Norn Iron. "Have you looked into schools in Northern Ireland?" No. It hadn't occurred to me. The desire was re-awoken. In an instant it was back.

Knowing how it was difficult to find programs in the state, it was going to be a real test to find one in Northern Ireland where there was only two large universities. "God, It's gonna be you that makes this happen." So I powered up the computer, started a search and bam- Masters in Design Communication at the University of Ulster.  I couldn't believe it. I applied and was accepted, and now I'm a student in the program.

But still it didn't stop there. Seriously. How quickly we forget things. As I was preparing for my arrival in Northern Ireland, and even up to two weeks ago, I would say that I don't feel like school is my only reason for being in Northern Ireland. And I still don't, but the desires of my heart that I had abandoned- God did not. I still had it in my head that it was a dead dream, though I'm living it.

As I sat in that small group two weeks ago, as the leader was talking about these desires God grants because he wants to make us happy, God was saying that grad school, that the program I'm in now, it's a gift he's given me. He didn't forget that I wanted it. Even though I'd given up on it, he knew it was something I really wanted. He wants me to be happy in this.

I'm frustrated in the program a bit, and I don't always want to give my all. (Honestly, I should be doing school work now and not be writing this blog) As my teachers before pushed me because they wanted the best out of me, God's asking that of me now. The verse I gave yesterday from Psalms 37, part of it was "Commit your way to the LORD; trust in him and he will do this." Like when I was in PLNU and I thought things weren't going work out. I had to commit it to him. He didn't bring me this far for me to fail or to give up. He wants to give good gifts.